Alternative Node Based Energy Depletion and Expected Residual Lifetime Balancing Method for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network is an infrastructure less network, where nodes are free to move independently in any direction. The nodes have limited battery power; hence we require efficient balancing techniques (energy depletion or expected residual lifetime, whichever is applicable under specific circumstances) to reduce overload on the nodes, wherever possible, to enhance their lifetime and network performance. This kind of balance among network nodes increase the average lifetime of nodes and reduce the phenomenon of network partitioning due to excessive exhaustion of nodes. In this paper, we propose an alternative-node based balancing method (ANB) that channels the forwarding load of a node to some other less exhausted alternative node provided that alternative node is capable of handling the extra load. This greatly reduces the number of link breakages and also the number of route-requests flooded in the network to repair the broken links. This, in turn, improves the data packet delivery ratio of the underlying routing protocol as well as average node lifetime.